We call a merciless execution good. We kiss the very means of this execution. What is wrong with us?
We celebrate a passion. We call to mind torture, not so we much so we can denounce it, or keep from doing it again in the future, but that we might enter into the hour of this torture more deeply. So that we might feel it more precisely. Are we sick? We buy the video made by Mel Gibson showing the scourging in greater detail than ever before. We go on campus to lift a KU student on a cross on Wescoe beach, showing off our love of this famous execution. What is wrong with us? We call evil good. We celebrate death. We kiss the most effective instrument of torture and humiliation the ancient world knew. If we really are this confused, we might as well call darkness light. We might as well call pleasure pain. We might as well call evil good. We might as well call nothing something.
If we may be so bold, we are here tonight to do all of these things. For our faith allows us to see the paradox inherent in the Lord's passion, and the paradox present to us tonight through our liturgy in the hour of our Lord's suffering and death. Our faith allows us to see in this holy hour the redefinition of good and evil, pleasure and pain, light and darkness, something and nothing, and yes, even life and death.
As surely as Jesus, through whom all things were made, created something from nothing, at the beginning of time, just so is our Lord creating something from nothing in this hour we contemplate - the hour of his crucifixion. In the beginning, Jesus created the world in obedience to the will of the Father, not but because He had to, but because He wanted to share of part of Himself. Just as surely as something came from nothing at the hour of the world's creation, so also in the precise hour we are here to celebrate, the hour of our Lord's passion, Jesus begins to remake the world in an even more beautiful way than it was originally made, not because He had to, not even because He merely wanted to share a part of Himself, but for a more noble purpose altogether, because He wanted to share all of Himself, including His creative power to bring something out of nothing. So we are here to celebrate something evil, the reduction of everything to nothing, that Jesus accomplished out of love not merely for His friends, but more especially for His enemies. On the cross, Jesus hands over everything that He has received from His Father, including His ability to create and to rule the world, into the hands of evil men. Jesus becomes nothing, drinking the cup of suffering that was in front of Him, and drinking it to the dregs, so as to completely empty Himself, so as to become nothing. He who was everything became nothing so that we who had lost everything through the sin of Adam, and through our own sin, might regain everything. For as Jesus says clearly in tonight's Gospel, He who is the Lord of all creation, who created everything out of nothing, He alone has the power to lay down His life and to take it up again. He embraces the cross chosen for Him by His Father not because He cannot avoid it, but because He wants to. Through the cross, Jesus wants again wants to make something out of nothing.
So we too tonight come to embrace the cross of Jesus, not merely because we cannot escape suffering and death, but because we want to be here. We want to kiss the cross. We would not kiss the cross if the cross only meant an inability on our part to avoid suffering and death. We might grab it begrudgingly, as a reminder to keep death daily before our eyes, and to be more aggressive in choosing suffering and death before it chooses us, lest we look like cowards, but for this reason alone, we would not kiss the cross. No, we come here tonight not because we have to, but because we want to. We want to kiss the cross. Why? Might I suggest that we kiss the cross because by faith we see the cross not simply as our natural ending but as a new beginning. We see in faith that from the death on the cross springs a new kind of life that we greatly desire, a life that no longer begins in light but ends in darkness, a life that no longer begins in goodness but ends in evil, a life that no longer begins with pleasure and ends with pain. We kiss the cross because we see in faith a world that can be remade from the axis of the cross. We see the cross as the beginning of a new story that we are invited to write with Jesus, a story that begins with evil but ends with goodness. A story that begins in pain, but ends in pleasure, a story that begins in darkness but ends with everlasting day. That is why we kiss the cross, not because we admit, to our dismay, that the cross is where our lives too must end, but because it is from the cross that we want our lives to truly begin. 
Beginning from the cross of Jesus, evil is defeated. That is why we kiss the cross. It is the tree of victory. In handing over to us everything that He received from His Father, including the power to create the world, Jesus chooses us to meet Him at Calvary, and to begin remaking the world with Him there. In kissing the cross, and accepting with joy every cross that comes our way, we escape the victimhood of having to accept suffering and death as the way things really are, and instead we volunteer, because we want to, to be chosen by Christ make up in our bodies what is lacking in His suffering, to enter into the great privilege of redeeming the world, bit by bit, with Jesus, beginning from the cross. Everlasting life means for us not simply avoiding enough evil to be put on the ark that Noah built, and so floating above evil, relatively untouched, nor does it mean vainly hoping that we will get a ticket back to Eden from whence we came, where all the drinks were free before man misused his freedom. No, everlasting life for us is a life that begins not in a land far, far away, a land of gated communities where Satan has not yet mastered mankind, but is a life that begins right here, and now, when we kiss the cross of Christ, where Satan is defeated. From the cross of Jesus that we kiss because He has chosen us to do so, and through the power of the divine faith and love most fully revealed to us in this hour, may we keep taking back inch by inch from Satan, through our willing suffering, a world that begins in light and ends in darkness, and continue building with Jesus, who has the power to lay down His life and take it up again, the new and eternal Jerusalem, a world that begins in death but ends in everlasting life! 
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